Empathy vs Apathy

Certain person has different ability of understanding and perceiving other people’s emotions, while there are numerous people who has the ability of ignoring or feeling nothing toward other. This article will discuss thoroughly the difference of empathy vs. apathy, the way they affect people’s life and behavior.

Empathy is the ability of understanding other people’s experiences, feelings and condition. Having the aptitude of putting yourself on their shoes and able to feel and understand what they actually feeling. This is also known to increase the helping behavior of a certain person. Empathy can be categorized into two:

Emotional or Affective Empathy: This is the capacity or capability of a person to respond with appropriate feeling to other’s metal condition. Generally refers to feelings and sensation that people get in corresponding to others personal emotions, which may include mirroring or seeing exactly what they feel and the ability to feel stress once a detected feeling of anxiety or fear is observed.

Emotional empathy can be identified separately into two scales such as the emphatic concern and personal distress. The empathic concern is the compassion or sympathy being felt for others due to their torment, while the personal distress is the feeling of anxiety, discomfort and self-centeredness as reaction to their suffering.

Cognitive Empathy: The capability to understand other persons mental and perspective state. This was subdivided into two scales such as fantasy and perspective taking. The fantasy is the ability and tendency of indentifying according to the fictional characters, while perspective taking is the tendency of spontaneously adopting other people’s psychological perspective.

According to studies and research, a person that suffers from spectrum autism disorder those experience difficulty in empathizing. Having this feeling does not automatically mean that you want to assist or aid other people in their needs and problems but it’s frequently the vital and primary step towards a compassionate action.

Apathy or perfunctoriness is generally defined as the lack of concern, interest, emotion and feeling. This is considered as the condition of indifference and suppression of feelings or emotions such as passion, motivations, excitement and concern. Once an individual is apathetic, they possess the absence of concern and interest about the world, physical life, philosophical, spiritual, social and emotional.

They may lack sense of meaning or purpose in life. They might exhibit sluggishness and insensibility. This can be a specific sign of mental disorders or problems like dementia or schizophrenia. Well, this is something that people may face in other capacity, this is a common response ones a person experience stress, rejection, dejection or disappointments.

Apathy is one of the way to forget negative feelings, this is commonly a common state of apathy that is being felt is a short period of time. Once it becomes a lifelong conditions a psychological and social issues were being present. According to studies, this is being felt after experiencing or witnessing horrific acts like killing or murders. Apathy is also believed to be psychiatric distinct syndrome which is being associated with several conditions like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and many more.